COAST TO COAST
According to wedding registry and planning company Zola, 40 percent of couples get engaged and start their registry between Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day. Timed with the start of engagement season, Zola partnered with Modern Love: The Podcast—a podcast based on The New York Times’s series of reader-submitted essays about love—to launch a multi-city tour that invited couples to record their personal love stories in a custom recording studio inside of a tricked-out 1970s camper.

The “Love Stories Tour” kicked off November 11 in New York and traveled to Chicago November 15, before making its final stop in Washington on November 18. Jennifer Spector, Zola’s director of brand marketing and newlywed-at-large, said that it was natural for the brand to collaborate with Modern Love for the interactive consumer event.

“We love love, so this engagement season we had the idea to collect everyday love stories. Our collaboration with Modern Love was obvious because we were already big fans of the show, and it is a podcast completely dedicated to real, authentic love,” said Spector. “It turns out that couples are not shy in a recording booth, and we’ve collected over 200 stories to date.”

Along with the recording studio, the 21-foot camper, which was dubbed the “Registry on Wheels,” was outfitted with a variety of gifts available for purchase from the brand’s online store to resemble a newlywed apartment. Ashley Jackson Events, Small Girls PR, and Zola designed the camper, which Spector says was inspired by the Zola Townhouse, the brand’s registry showroom in New York.

“We put our stamp on the ‘Registry On Wheels’ to give couples a real taste of the 50,000 gifts that we carry in the Zola store,” she said. “We even put our stamp on the recording studio, that we custom-built for two.”

In addition to the recording studio element, the tour also featured wedding cake tastings from local bakeries, and offered Zola advisors to share planning tips with couples.

The audio captured in the camper will be edited by Modern Love and available to listen to on the podcast website in February. Several of the audio stories will be selected to air at the end of podcast episodes around Valentine’s Day.